Tuesday, December 24, 2013

I
have been told that my last letter was not very cheerful. I’ll have you know
that one of my readers laughed so hard upon reading it that she suffered an
asthma attack. If that’s not funny I don’t know what is! Now on to the next
lighthearted, humorous installment:

Before
Jerusalem was utterly destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 AD, there was no
clear distinction between Jew and Christian; in fact there was no clear
distinction between the Jew and Christian until the complete defeat of the
Jewish nation by the Romans in response to the Bar Kochba revolt around 130 AD.
Before then, Christianity was thought of as a sect of the Hebrew religion.

By
then, there were a number of forms of Christianity. There were the Gnostics who
tried to combine Egyptian and Persian religion with the teachings of Jesus.
There were Israelites who believed Jesus to be the Messiah, but never conceded
His divinity. Then there were His followers, the Twelve and the other
disciples, who taught that Jesus was the Son of Mary and the Son of God, fully
human and fully divine.

One
often hears the question, “Why did the Jews reject Jesus?” Dr. Rodney Stark, a
sociologist, makes the point that, in fact, the Jews didn’t reject Jesus. Many,
perhaps most Greek-speaking Jews in the first centuries after Christ, accepted
Jesus, His divinity, His humanity and His redemptive death. At the time of
Christ there were 6 or 7 million Jews in the Roman Empire. Two hundred or so
years after Christ there were less than a million. There must have been quite a
bit of attrition through war and plague, but not enough to obliterate 6 million
people. Dr. Stark, echoed by Fr. Richard Neuhaus, makes the point that much of
the substantial Samaritan population and the even larger Jewish population of
the Empire probably accepted Jesus as the Messiah (the Christ) and blended in
with the Greek speaking population.

In
this sense Christianity can be thought of as the first Reformed Judaism. One
could eat pork and shrimp and not undergo circumcision but could still be a
member of the House of Israel, reading the Torah and the prophets and singing
the psalms that one had always sung — no worshiping Isis, or some snake-god or
winged thing, and eating cheese on your hamburger. It was all good. Thus,
though Jews were thrown out of Judea and enslaved, and though no Jew could
enter Aelia Capitolina, the rebuilt Roman version of Jerusalem, there were
always Christians there. The lines between Jew and Greek were blurred by
Christianity, so the living memory of the places and events associated with
Jesus were never forgotten. There was always someone on the site who
remembered. In 190 AD, or thereabouts, Sextus Julius Africanus (a Greek
Christian) who had been born in Jerusalem was able to interview the surviving
relatives of Jesus regarding the discrepancies in Jesus’ genealogy. By the year 190 AD, people were very
interested in this Jesus, whether they were Jewish, Christian or somewhere in
between.

I
thought all this bother and brouhaha about the pilgrimage sites was a bunch of
hogwash until I went on a pilgrimage led by one of the very few Arab Catholic
guides in the Holy land. Arab Christians, especially those from Syria, the Holy
Land, Lebanon and like places are most probably descendants of those first
Christians who were among the Jews who accepted Jesus. I personally know a
family that can trace its origin to exiles from the first siege of Jerusalem
around 70 AD. The Holy Land at the time
of Christ was a mix of Greek and Jew and this mestizo culture blended even more
under the reconciling influence of Christ. This Arab Catholic guide was no
small intellect. He was a teacher and a graduate of the University of
Albuquerque. He told me a wonderful story. His father took him to a field and
pointed out a tree and told him, “My great grandfather proposed marriage to my
great grandmother under that very tree.
I took my grandson and showed him that tree.” His point was that small,
personal details are not soon forgotten among the inhabitants of the Holy Land.

I
thought about it. I remember my old pastor telling me when I was a boy that he
had seen the sun dance during the Fatima miracle in 1917. It is now a hundred
years later and I have told the children in my parish who will bring the story
into yet another century. Human memory is longer than we moderns want to
believe. Another factor is the incredible smallness of the Holy Land. Most of
the ministry of Jesus happened in an area called the Gospel Triangle, bounded
at three points by Capernaum, Bethsaida and Chorazin. It is a triangle about 5
miles, by 4 miles by 2 miles. The multiplication of the loaves took place down
the beach from where the sermon on the miraculous catch of fish was made and
just down the hill from where the Sermon on the Mount was preached. Jerusalem
is only a leisurely 3-day hike from Nazareth. For an old man to show his
grandson where Jesus worked unforgettable miracles would take no more than an
afternoon. By the time Christians were
coming to Judea from all over the Roman Empire, these places were well known to
many.

In
the church of the Holy Sepulcher there is an interesting graffito. As I
mentioned above, the emperor Hadrian obliterated what was left of the city of
Jerusalem in 130 AD. Jews were not allowed to enter the city. But Greeks were
allowed and Greek Christians and those Jews who had been Hellenized by their
exposure to Christianity never stopped venerating the shrines associated with
the life of Christ. In order to put a stop to it, Hadrian paved over the
remains of Jewish Jerusalem and built his city, Aelia Capitolina, directly over
the old quarry where the tomb of Christ and Calvary were located, he place a
central plaza and a temple to Aphrodite over the tomb and a statue of Zeus
directly over Golgotha. On the huge stone blocks of the retaining wall of that
plaza, there is a drawing of a Roman ship and a graffito in Latin “Domine, ivimus” or “Lord, we shall
go” Possibly a reference to Psalm 122.
It is thought to have written anytime from 150 AD to 300 AD. It was certainly
written before the church of the Holy Sepulcher was built. Bishop Melito of
Sardis around 150 AD said that the site of Calvary and the Holy Sepulcher were
in the middle of the street, in the middle of the city, right below Hadrian's
temple in honor of Aphrodite.

The story goes
that when the empress Helena, mother of Constantine, came looking for the holy
places in around 325, bishop Macarius of Jerusalem told her right where to dig.
Eusebius the historian, who lived at the time of the first excavation of the
tomb, said that the tomb showed “…clear and visible proof”. People think these
signs must have been supernatural. I don’t. Christians as we have seen, scrawl
graffiti everywhere. The tomb of Peter in Rome is covered with them. The house
of Peter in Capernaum is covered with them, so why not the tomb of Christ,
buried under the rubble of the old Jewish city?

Everyone
knew where the Lord had been buried. It was not on hill far away, it was at one
of the main gates of the city. The Romans reasoned, “Why waste a perfectly good
execution? Have it somewhere where everyone can benefit by it.” And of course,
the Bible says that in the place was also the tomb, and so it was found. The
other tomb, the second tomb which you mentioned, called the Garden Tomb, was
discovered only in the last century. A German scholar named Otto Thenius
decided that a hill north of the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem was the real
Calvary because if you squinted and tilted your head the right way it sort of
looked like a skull. He found a tomb nearby and decided that it must be the
tomb of Christ. Another archaeologist upon hearing of the discovery said, “Ach, du meine Gute! I hope that’s not
the tomb of Christ! I myself took the bones out of there just a few days ago!”
It turns out that the tomb was from the 1st
temple period about seven hundred years before the time of Christ. There is
only one site continuously venerated as the site of Calvary and the tomb and
that is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Why
a cave? Homeowners took advantage of caves. They were pre-dug basements; cool
in summer, warm in winter. They kept livestock in them which kept the place a
little warmer in winter — space heaters on the hoof. The ancestral home of my
family in lower upper-Hessia had a built-in chicken coop on the first floor.
Mmm... chickens... nice, warm chickens.

Where
was I? Yes. That’s the joy of being a Catholic, or for that matter orthodox. We
have long memories. We, like the Blessed Mother have treasured these things in
our hearts for two thousand years. There is a stone manger, a feed trough dug
into the wall of the cave. It is like other feed troughs dug into the stone of
that hard land. I have no doubt that you can go there and touch the very manger
into which Mary laid the Baby Jesus on the first Christmas two thousand years
ago. We have never forgotten where it was.

Friday, December 20, 2013

I
was recently on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and our tour guide, Abdul ibn
Turghaid, showed us the stone for lack of which Jesus had no place to lay his
head and then he showed us the inn where the parable of the Good Samaritan
didn’t happen, but would have had it not been a parable. Then we saw two tombs
where Jesus rose from the dead. Abdul insisted that Jesus had risen at both
tombs. He explained that apparently there was a matinee performance for those
who had missed the early morning resurrection. Eventually we made our way past
many check points and frowning bureaucrats to a dingy old church in Bethlehem
where we stood in line to go down some steps into what seemed to be a basement
that was in fact a cave when you looked behind all the tapestries and wall
hangings. Come on, now. I have been to
enough Christmas pageants to know that Jesus was born in a stable, not a cave.
Isn’t that what the Bible says? How do they know what was what after two
thousand years? Isn’t most of this stuff made up? The Bible stories don’t agree
with each other. I heard one theologian say that Jesus was born in Bethlehem
and then another one said the whole story was made up. How do we know what
happened

Yours,

Paul
Grimage

Dear
Paul,

You
don’t know if you’re not a Catholic, or at least in an apostolic church. An
apostolic church is one that can trace its origins back to the founding of the Church
by Christ through the ministry of the Apostles. We have an early Christian
writer, a Greek who was the bishop of a Roman city in what is now France. His
Name was Irenaeus of Lyon. He was born
around 130 AD. That’s only 100 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection.
That’s not a very long time. I know stories that my mother told about her
father that go back to 1880. I am an American and we Americans have the memory
span of distracted goldfish. If I can remember trivial details that go back 130
years, certainly an ancient Greek or Jewish Christian who was paying attention
to the stories for which he eventually would give his life as martyr probably
got the story down pretty well from the people who told it. The martyr-bishop
Irenaeus was the student of St. Polycarp, born 69AD who was also a martyr. St.
Polycarp was a disciple of St John the Apostle. This is what Irenaeus had this
to say about apostolic tradition:

....It would be very tedious, in such a volume as this,
to reckon up the successions of all the Churches.... [we do this, I say,] by
indicating that tradition derived from the apostles, of the very great, the
very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the
two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul... which comes down to our time by
means of the successions of the bishops. For it is a matter of necessity that
every Church should agree with the Church (of Rome).... inasmuch as the apostolic
tradition has been preserved continuously by them... (Adversus, Book III,
Chapter 3)

I
quote this text not for my usual smug “Hurray for our team!” purpose for which
I usually quote sources, but to point out that 100 years after Christ, remembering
and passing on these traditions was very important to Christians. This may be
hard to believe for us moderns who can barely remember who won Dancing with the
Stars last year, but ancient people valued their history and did their best to
preserve it, though their sense of history was different than ours.

You
have two questions, “Is Scripture reliable and is Tradition reliable?” The Scriptures, especially the Gospels can be
spotty, and even seem to be contradictory at times. The four Gospels leave out
details like what color veil did the Blessed Mother wear? (Everyone knows it
was blue, because the picture in my grandmother’s bedroom has her wearing a
blue robe, the exact color of her blue eyes, framed by her flaxen blond hair.)
There are things that just weren’t important to the ancients that we think
crucial, like the exact time and date of birth of a poor boy, born in a barn.
The great and mighty noted the time and date and place so that they could have
their horoscopes prepared. Mary and Joseph apparently weren’t worried about
Jesus’ horoscope. They were worried about Herod, who was very interested in the
time and place of Jesus birth. I imagine a more important date for the Holy
Family was the day they arrived safely in Egypt. The Gospels can be very
disappointing if one is looking for gossipy details. Far more disturbing are
the apparent contradictions. How many angels were at the resurrection? Did
Jesus ascend to heaven from the Mount of Olives or from a hill in Galilee? Was
he born in Bethlehem or Nazareth? Why
can’t the Bible seem to get it straight if it’s an inspired text? The answer is
simple. The first Christians as we have seen from the text of St. Irenaeus
handed down exactly what they received.

There
are four Gospels that the early Church most respected, Matthew, Mark, Luke and
John. John is distinct from the others and seems to have been addressed to a
very specific audience. My theory is that it was aimed at those who thought
John the Baptist was the Messiah. It is probably the last Gospel to be written.
The other three are called the synoptic Gospels. The word synoptic is a Greek
word that means “look alike”. The look alike Gospels are pretty similar but, of
the three, only the Gospel of Matthew has ever been thought of as eyewitness
testimony. Luke and Mark were not among the twelve apostles. The long-standing
tradition is that Mark had been an administrative assistant to St. Peter and
that Luke had been a friend and assistant to St. Paul. Have you ever seen a car
wreck? I hope not. But if you have, you know that two people describing the
same wreck describe it differently. One notices the dent in the back of the car,
the other the dent in the front, but not always both and so on. So it was with
these very different and very human accounts of the events of the life and
ministry of Christ. The three Synoptic Gospels weren’t written, at least in my
opinion, as evangelistic tools. The Gospel was an oral phenomenon. St Paul says
“if someone teaches another Gospel than the one I preached...” (Galatians 1:9)

The
Gospel was shared by word of mouth. The texts we have were taken from a common
fund of knowledge about the life of Christ. My theory is that Matthew was aimed
at Pharisees to point out that Jesus was the fulfillment of prophesy and was
the Messiah. Matthew was written to show that Jesus was the Son of God and Luke
was written as a sort of “friend of the court brief” to convince the former
High Priest, “your Excellency Theophilus”, a son of Annas and High Priest from
AD 37 to AD 41. The theory is that
Theophilus was the high priest who delegated Paul’s trip to Damascus to clear
up this Christian mess and, to Theophilus’ horror, Paul came back as one of
them. Theophilus may have lodged the accusation against Paul with the Roman
authorities and Luke, the only non-Hebrew author in the New Testament, wrote
Luke/Acts of the Apostles as a two-part defense of Paul requesting that
Theophilus withdraw his accusation. Just a theory.

If
you think of the Gospels as modern style histories of the life of Jesus, you
are going to be disappointed. They are, I believe, documents that were written
by their human authors to make certain points about the life of Christ: that He
fulfilled the prophetic expectations about the Messiah (Matthew); that He was
the Son of God (Mark); that He and His disciple Paul were innocent of the
charges (Luke/Acts); and that He, not John the Baptist, was the Messiah, the
true Lamb of sacrifice of the true Passover (John). However the Holy Spirit
meant, I believe, to show us the aspects of the life of Christ that are
necessary for our salvation and redemption. What color Mary’s veil was is not
essential to the work of our salvation.

All
this doesn’t exactly answer the question, “Are they reliable?” The fact that
they seem to be at variance with one another is the proof that they are
reliable. That’s the nature of Sacred Tradition. If someone a couple centuries
after Christ had tried to polish up the accounts of Christ’s ministry that
would be suspicious. They said, “No, this is what we have received, this is
what we hand on to you, whole and entire.” The small apparent discrepancies are
not very important and are probably quite reconcilable. The four canonical
Gospels are unedited because they are eyewitness accounts made by human beings,
though inspired and used by the Holy Spirit. Two of them are quite probably eye
witness accounts (Matthew and John) and two are probably second hand accounts (Mark
and Luke). The Church has, from the very first, been scrupulous to hand down
nothing less and nothing more than it received from Christ through the ministry
of the apostles, even though that handing down has some questions attached to
it. You can trust the Gospels.

As
for your question about the places associated with the life of Jesus, that will
have to wait until next week!

Friday, December 13, 2013

Depressing? Me? Depressing? I’ve
always thought of myself as a lighthearted commentator on the foibles of the
modern world, at least as lighthearted as lower-upper-Hessians can possibly be.
In the town of Allendorf, Hessen whence comes the family of my father, it is the
custom to send the young men of the village out into the forest armed only with
bottles of schnapps and axes. There, they cut down a pine tree, drag it back
into the village and set it up again. This is not associated with Christmas but
with the patronal feast of St. Catherine. No one can explain why this is done
or for how long it has been done. Allendorf means the “Old village” a name it
has born since around 700 AD. I suspect we have been doing it ever since the
Neanderthals found out that rotten fruit was still edible, or at least
drinkable. Sending young men into the woods with booze and potential weapons
has always been our idea of fun.

A few miles east of Allendorf is the town
Neustadt, Hessen whence comes my mother’s family. The forest east of town is
thought to be the place of origin for the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, told
by the well-named Brothers Grimm. It is the tender children’s story of a little
girl who is attacked by a wolf that has just eaten her grandmother. These
stories were told to generations of lower upper Hessian children to help them
fall asleep. Grimm fairy tales indeed!

In the hills of Westphalen, north of us, there
is a charming Easter custom. Giant wooden wheels, 7 feet in diameter and 800
pounds in weight are packed with straw, set on fire and rolled down the
hills. Most people just watch and cheer as the flaming wheels roll down the
hill. They wait anxiously to see which wheels make it all the way down still on
fire. I have also heard that the young men run down the hill in front of the
blazing wheels, a sort of Germanic “running of the idiots” not unlike the
running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. I have also heard that if one of the
runners is hit by one of the wheels it is considered a mark of great good
fortune for the coming year. I suppose it’s a matter of, “If I
survive being run over by an immense flaming wheel, nothing worse is going to
happen to me this year....probably.” I am not sprung from people who could be
called cheerful in the conventional sense. All this considered, I suppose I am
doing my best to be cheerful in the face of a culture that is even screwier
than a bunch of drunken German adolescents chopping down trees or trying to get
run over by flaming wagon wheels.

So, here goes: A cheerful article about the date
of Christmas!

No matter what you have heard, Christmas may
actually have occurred on December 25th! The first indisputable
mention of December 25 as the date of Christ’s birth is found in a Roman
calendar written about 350 AD that lists the deaths of various Christian
martyrs. In it we find, “December 25, Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea.”
By 400AD, St. Augustine says that the heretical Donatists observed Christmas on
December 25, but didn’t celebrate the Epiphany on January 6, the Donatists
claiming it was an innovation. The Donatists traced their origin to 312 AD and
were notorious for their rigid conservatism. This would mean that some
Christians in the Latin speaking world regarded the 25th of December as the
anniversary of the birth of the Lord from before the date when Christianity was
still persecuted and certainly not the religion of the Roman Empire.

At around 200AD, St. Hippolytus of Rome seems to
favor the December 25th date, or possibly late March. He is
ambiguous and people argue about the manuscripts anyway. At around the same
time Bishop Clement of Alexandria mentions a few dates as possible candidates
for the anniversary of Christ’s birth. His favorite was the 25th day of
Pachon. Pachon is an Egyptian month and 25 Pachon is sometime calculated
as the 20th of May. Clement also mentions the possibility that
Jesus was born in late November.

The problem is that it is very difficult if not
impossible to co-ordinate ancient Egyptian calendars with modern western
calendars. The calendar was moveable. Before the beginning of the 3rd century,
no one was very interested in the date of Christ’s birth. They were much more
interested in the date of Christ’s death and of his conception. After all the
Word became Flesh not on Christmas but on the Feast of the Annunciation, March
25th. The reason that March 25th was celebrated as
the feast of the Annunciation, (the conception of Christ in the womb of the
Virgin), is that the date of Christ’s death was fairly well known and there seems
to have been a belief that a true prophet should die on the anniversary of his
conception.

The Eastern Church with whom we in the West have
never been able to coordinate our calendars marked it as January 6th,
so it seems that the 12 days of Christmas were all-inclusive from Dec. 25 to
Jan 6th. Until my childhood that was Christmas, Dec. 25 until
Jan.6. The tree went up on Christmas Eve and stayed up until the feast of the
Three Kings. That way, all the possible dates venerated by Latin and Greek
Christians from around the year 200 were covered. Now of course, Christmas
begins just before Halloween and we are sick of it by the afternoon of Dec 25th When
we start shopping for the after-Christmas sales and try to figure out how drunk
to get on New Year’s Eve. The whole schmear ends with enduring a headache on
Jan. 1st as we watch football and take down the tree.

We don’t know the exact date of Christ’s birth
in terms of a perfect atomic clock, but I suspect that we have got it
essentially right in the 12 days of Christmas, by which I don’t mean the
song about waterfowl and dancing aristocrats. The important thing to remember
here is that Christmas did NOT originate as a distraction to the Roman
Saturnalia or the feast of the unconquered sun. Saturnalia was celebrated
originally for only one day on December 17th and when it
expanded in later times, it was definitely over by the 23rd which
was the feast of the Sigilaria which at some point did involve gift giving.
Christmas gift giving is a very modern custom. Gifts were traditionally given
on St. Nicholas Day and on the feast of the Three Kings (Epiphany). The feast
of the unconquered sun did not enter Roman calendars until after many
Christians were already celebrating Dec. 25 as the feast of Christ’s birth. It
is more likely that the feast of the unconquered sun was emphasized to distract
pagans from the Christian celebration of December 25th.

So, be of good cheer. We really are celebrating
the wonder of Christ’s birth and not simply some really good bargains at the
big box stores. And this is my attempt at cheerfulness. Merry Christmas!

Friday, December 6, 2013

My
piece-of-work, hare-brained pastor has done it again. He is now celebrating the
first Mass of Sunday facing the wall. There is already some Latin sung at the
Mass, and he allows people to receive communion kneeling. Now this! Doesn’t he
know that the Vatican Council did away with Latin at Mass and kneeling for
communion and facing the wall? Is he trying to drag us back to the dark
ages? My parents built this church and
now he is changing my Mass, the Mass I have always gone to. How dare he turn
his back on us! What are we? Chopped liver?

Yours,

Patty D. Maison

Dear
Patty,

It
is clear to me that you are an enlightened progressive person, who will not
tolerate intolerance. I can see that you want nothing but the best for God’s
Church and you will not allow people to slip back into former modes of prayer
from the dark days when the churches were full and confessional lines long. It
is clear that you feel it your duty as an enlightened person to make sure that
everyone does what you think is right. Bravo!

I
fear however that you may be mistaken about a few things. Before launching into
a few slight corrections, I urge you to be flexible with your old pastor. He is
probably an aging hippy who read Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book one too many times, particularly the line “Let a
thousand flowers bloom....” You said
that he allows people to kneel for communion. Does he force them to kneel, or
does he let them make up their own mind about the matter? He has brought back Latin, or is there Latin
at all the Masses? It is curious that you say it is your Mass. Are there other people at the Mass, or
are you the only person in attendance? The Mass I would think belongs to the Lord
and the Church Universal. If you don’t benefit from his antique style at the
early Mass, you might go to one of the Masses that is more to your personal
taste. It doesn’t sound like he has forced this foolishness on all the Masses,
just the earliest one on Sunday.

As
for the Vatican Council ending kneeling for Communion, that is not quite true.
As far as I can find, the first incident of standing for Communion had nothing
to do with the council. It was something used at a liturgical convention in
Seattle in 1962. The reason given for the change was that it would speed things
up, a deeply spiritual reason if ever there was one, I’m sure.

And as for the Vatican Council taking
Latin out of the mass, it just isn’t so. Surprisingly, the Vatican Council
foresaw a limited use of the common
modern tongue at mass for pastoral reasons, but intended the Latin rite Mass to
continue in Latin. The Council said that “. . . the use of the Latin language
is to be preserved in the Latin rites.”(Sacrosanctum Concilium, #36; December
4, 1963)

The
council never mandated that the priest face the people at the liturgy. Altars
were to be moved out from the wall, making it possible to walk around them, but
I have never been able to find the document that says the whole liturgy must be
offered facing the congregation.

Still
more shocking, the newest Roman Missal assumes that the celebrant is facing
away from the people for large sections of the Novus Ordo, or Ordinary Form of the Mass. In the Missal there are
black letters and red letters. The red letters are called rubrics, form the
Latin word for red. The black letters are what the celebrant is supposed to
say, the red letters indicate what the celebrant is supposed to do. In the 3rd Roman Missal the rubrics
indicate that the celebrant must face the people only seven times, as far as I
can tell. Here are the citations from the missal. You can look ‘em up if you
don’t believe me.

1. When the people are gathered, the Priest
approaches the altar.....venerates the altar with a kiss... then... with the
ministers, he goes to the chair. When the Entrance Chant is concluded, the
Priest and the faithful, standing, sign themselves with the Sign of the Cross,
while the Priest, facing the people, says: “In the name of the Father, and of
the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” (The rubrics seem to
imply that the greeting and the penance rite are said facing the people, since
they are addressed to the people, not to the Lord and thus are included in the
rubric indicating that the celebrant face the people at this point in the
Mass.)

29.
Standing at the middle of the altar, facing the people, extending and then
joining his hands, he says: “Pray, brethren...”
(The end of the offertory)

127.
The Priest, turned towards the people, extending and then joining his hands,
adds: “The peace of the Lord be with you always...” (The sign of peace)

132.
The Priest genuflects, takes the host and, holding it slightly raised above the
paten or above the chalice, while facing the people, says aloud: “Behold the
Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world. Blessed are those
called to the supper of the Lamb...”

139.
Then, standing at the altar or at the chair and facing the people, with hands
joined, the priest says “Let us pray...” (The final prayer)

141
Then the dismissal takes place. The Priest, facing the people and extending his
hands, says: “The Lord be with you...”
(The blessing)

144. Then the Deacon, or the Priest himself, with
hands joined and facing the people, says “Go forth the Mass is ended.”

The
part of this that I find most interesting is not just that the priest may face
away from the congregation, but that it seems expected. Still more interesting
is that almost no one except the Pope Emeritus and a few curmudgeons like your
pastor seem to notice or follow what seems to be clearly implied in the
rubrics. Go figure.

Why
no one seems to notice, much less follow the rubrics is completely beyond me. I
suppose that’s because no one actually reads the rubrics. They assume these
things were mandated by the council and are demanded by the rules. You know
what they say about the word “assume.” “To assume makes a beast of burden out
of you and me.”

I
suppose that it is allowed to say Mass facing the people, but it seems odd when
you think about it. The rubrics seem to indicate that when the priest is
speaking to the people, he faces the people. When he is leading them in prayer,
standing in for Christ, he faces the Lord, with the people. This makes sense.
It isn’t as earth shattering as it first appears. The priest faces the people
these seven times and while he is seated in the presider’s chair. In the
average mass of 50 minutes, using the 2nd Canon and including a homily, the priest faces away from the
people for all of 10 minutes maximum.

In
the old days there were quite a few mortal sins that a priest could commit
while saying Mass if he willingly altered the structure of the Mass. It used to
seem absurd to me that the rubrics were that important. I have had my mind
changed in my old age. After seeing enough clergy skipping down the aisles
distributing Easter eggs, or wearing clown makeup or dressed as Barney the
Purple Dinosaur, I understand that the prohibitions were aimed at clerical
narcissism. They were not simply medieval taboos.

You
said that the 8 am Mass was your Mass. I understand what you mean. It is your
custom. However a priest who decides that the Liturgy of the Church is “his” to
play with as he pleases does commit a very grave sin. The Mass is unfortunately
a wonderful stage for those who fancy themselves actors. The Mass is no one’s
property except the Lord’s and the celebrant is nothing more than the servant
of the Lord and of His bride, the Church. To personalize the Mass excessively
is to take what belongs to the Lord for one own self expression and even
aggrandizement. Perhaps it is a good thing that the priest occasionally turns
to the Lord with the people whose servant he is and of whom he is just a part
by virtue of his Baptism. Perhaps by turning away from the people and facing
the Lord with them, the celebrant will remember that he is not the center of
the Mass. It is the Lord who is the object of adoration as Pope Francis has
reminded us.

Friday, November 29, 2013

St.
Dymphna’s in Frostbite Falls will offer the church and the church hall
absolutely free of charge to any parishioner who wants a simple exchange of
wedding vows.

First
let us define parishioner. In these days of cafeteria Catholicism, a
parishioner in my book is someone who has a genuine pastoral relationship with
their pastor, attends Mass faithfully and is registered in the parish.
Canonically I must also include anyone who is baptized and has received their
First Holy Communion and lives in the parish boundaries, even though I may
never have met them and couldn’t pick them out a crowd of two.

Now
let us define simple exchange of wedding vows.

The
wedding party has a bride, a groom and two witnesses, one male and one female,
no more. Parents may walk up the aisle with their daughter or accompany their
son, but that’s it -- no bridesmaids, no wedding march, no little kids, no flower
girl, no ring bearer. One witness can carry the rings. As for music, the parish
organist can be hired, but that’s it. No soloists, even your cousin Hildegard,
no musicians, no harpist, flautist or kazoo players. The groom and the male
witness may not wear rented tuxedos. Just decent pants, shoes, shirt and tie
with a suit jacket if desired. No ridiculous novelty bus, hummer or stretch
limo. There can be a wedding mass or just the exchange of vows as is felt
appropriate. The bride may wear a white dress if appropriate, with sleeves or a
shawl or vest that covers the shoulders. (It has always struck me as odd when
some bride dressed in reams of gleaming white mosquito netting stands there
with her five children.) There may be
photos, but no professional photographer. If you are going to pay the
outrageous cost of a professional photographer, it’s no longer a simple
wedding. The congregation may then adjourn to the parish hall for a simple
wedding breakfast immediately following the ceremony. Finger food, hors d’oeuvres, a cake and champagne or wine for the toast. No music. No beer. No
booze. No DJ. No sit down feast for four hundred -- just a receiving line and a
“nosh”, cake and a toast. The entire expense of the event would be the dress
and the food. No place cards, no long boring videos of the bride and groom as
infants, no roasts, just the sacrament.

Who
would do this? It sounds depressing. It’s a lot less depressing than starting
married life with a huge debt and an aching head, and possibly a fight with the
new in-laws. Use the money to take a trip or buy a house or pay off your
student loans. I have had weddings like this and they are actually elegant in
their simplicity. The simple wedding allows a couple to prepare for a life
together in a relaxed and spiritual way and when the day of their wedding
arrives, they are not at the end of their wits, thinking about nothing but the
screw up with the place cards and the gifts for the bridesmaids and whether
they should acknowledge the groom’s father’s second and third wives thereby enraging
the first wife and risking a brawl in the ladies room and the arrival of the
police at the banquet hall.

I
said much earlier that no one thinks weddings are important anymore except
homosexuals, wedding planners and divorce lawyers. It is time for the Catholic
Church to get out of the wedding business and get back into the business of the
sacrament of Holy Matrimony. The government has never agreed with the Catholic
Church on what a wedding really is. We believe in an indissoluble, covenantal
sacrament that ends only with the death of one of the parties. The government
wedding is a contract that ends when it is convenient to end it. Now
legislators are falling all over each in the attempt to assure the electorate
that they are more tolerant and nicer than their political opponents by being
the first on their block to approve the redefinition of marriage and the family
to include anyone you may please.

When all states and all the legislators have
approved same sex weddings, doubtless they will move on to demonstrate their
open mindedness by approving multiple couples weddings, male and female harems,
and then weddings with pets and perhaps with inanimate objects. What the world
has decided to call a wedding, is not something of which we even approve. I
have said it often enough and will say it again. Some clever Catholic lawyer
should get a class action suit going to make the point that government’s
involvement in weddings is a violation of the separation of church and state.
If I have a wedding for which there is no wedding license, I am guilty of a
FELONY!!! In effect that means I cannot bless a wedding that the state has not
first approved. It will not be long before my refusal to bless a wedding of
which the state approves will come with a fine and perhaps imprisonment. Now
the state is content to tell me who I may not marry. In a very little while the
state will insist on its right to tell whom I MUST marry. The state and the culture have redefined
marriage and thus it is not something with which I care to be involved. We must
dump weddings and return to the old and tasteful wine of the exchange of
marriage vows.

If
you are a couple, and by this I mean an engaged couple, or even people who are
living together in a civil marriage or without benefit of any marriage at all.
What you may ask is the difference between a wedding and the exchange of vows?
Simple. The first is a photo-event and a great pain in the neck. The second is
a simple statement that, “I promise to be faithful to you for the rest of my
life, and to care for you and for any children that God may give us.”

Ladies, if the old goat with whom you are
sharing your life at the moment will not vow before God and the Church in the
most solemn way that he will be faithful to you for the rest of your life, I
would drop him like a bad habit. Change them locks! Get a new phone number,
password and E- mail address. He’s a bum and not worth your time. If Becky Sue,
that hussy, gives you the business about a bargain basement wedding, or some
such nonsense just tell her that she may have had a perfectly lovely wedding,
but you have a husband who loves you, your children and the Lord.

Yours
monotonously,

The
Rev. Know-it-all

P.S.
Fr. Simon of St. Lambert’s in Skokie, a loose cannon if ever there was one, and
a remarkably poor theologian, has
written to tell that his experiment with changing the method of educating
children for First Holy Communion has been a raging success, despite the fact
that he was involved with it. The first
confession class was the best prepared he had ever met and the desire for Holy
Communion was very real and he really recognized the candidates from their
regular participation in Sunday Mass with their parents. Instead of a post-reconciliation
party after the first confessions, there was an enrollment in the Scapular
which was very moving. The program
apparently only met with a sort of mentor once a month. The rest of the time
the parents were provided with teaching materials and they themselves taught
the children. It worked splendidly, the parents and their children spent almost
an entire year growing together in faith and love for Christ. It was amazing to
watch faith become a family affair, rather than a “drop ’em off, pick ‘em up”
sort of thing. The joy of the sacrament shared by parents and children alike
was deeply touching. The parents really fulfilled the hope expressed at Baptism
that they would be the first and best of teachers in the ways of faith. I know
that the program did not succeed because of Fr. Simon. He is a fog-bound idiot.
The credit must go first to the Holy Spirit, and then to Mrs. Dorothy Amorella,
the mentor and Jonathan Rivera, the co-coordinator, and above all to the
parents who loved their children enough to try a difficult experiment.

Friday, November 22, 2013

Here’s a
plan to remedy the craziness that the sacraments have become. It’s from the
Bible — you know, that big book on the coffee table. There is a passage in the
New Testament that has always bothered me.
“No one puts new wine into old wineskins, otherwise the new wine will
burst the skins and it will be spilled out, and the skins will be ruined. But
new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one, after drinking old wine
wishes for new, for he says, ‘The old is pleasant. ’” (Luke 5:37-38.)

Everyone
knows that Jesus is saying that innovation is good, after all isn’t he
recommending new wine? Why then does he say that old wine is good, and that
having drunk the old, no one wants new? It makes no sense!

(CAUTION; I
am the only person I have ever heard say the following things, so I am probably
wrong. Don’t say you weren’t warned!)
The phrase new
wine appears only in
the context of this New Testament dialogue with the Pharisees. The Bible
mentions new wine in the Old Testament, but the references are pretty negative
such as Hosea 4:11 “old wine and new wine take away their understanding” and
Job 32:19 “Inside I am like bottled-up wine, like new wineskins ready to
burst.”

If you look
up new wine on the internet, there is an unending succession of New Wine
reverences: New Wine movement, New Wine church, New Wine magazine and so on. It
never seems to occur to anyone that Jesus seems to say that new wine is not
always the best. There is a catch. Jesus
is talking to the Pharisees who are criticizing him for eating with sinners,
which by their standards would render him ritually unclean. I think He is
saying that their teaching about radical ritual purity is new wine, and I don’t
think he means it as a compliment.

The
Pharisees, a name that means “the Separated”, got started about a hundred and
fifty years before the birth of Christ. They taught that all Israelites in all
places were bound by the halachic laws of ritual cleanliness which had formerly
had applied only to those going up to the temple and to the priestly classes.
Jesus taught that this was a departure from Israelite tradition that turned the
worship of God into legalistic observance.

The old wine
of the covenant of God with Abraham and Moses is better and Jesus claimed to be
the fullness of that covenant. He was warning that the new wine of the
Pharisees would burst the wineskin of Israel. He was absolutely correct. The
rabbinic Pharisee movement which most people simply call Judaism has kept its
adherents outside the mainstream of Israel and of the wider world. The
Pharisees believed that was the purpose of the Law of Moses. However, most
Israelites, especially in the Greek speaking Roman Empire seem to have accepted
Jesus as Messiah in the first three centuries after Christ. Thus, they brought
the beauty of the religion of the Israel to the whole world. Rabbinic
Phariseeism is not responsible for the dispersion of the ethical and moral
treasure of the faith throughout the world. The Notzrim are. (Notzrim is
the ancient Hebrew/Aramaic word for the Israelite sect of the Nazarenes, also
known as Christians). The Notzrim accepted gentiles into the family of Israel
without the imposition of ritual purity laws.

Jesus also
said that, “A disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house
who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.” (Matt
13:53) CS Lewis says the same thing in
chapter 25 of The Screwtape Letters,
a delightful correspondence between two demons, a senior devil and his nephew,
a junior tempter. In chapter 25 Screwtape advises Wormwood, “The horror of the
Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the
human heart — an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel,
infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship.”

We moderns
love the new, no matter how chintzy and garish it may be. Have you ever bought
a product that was not marketed as new and improved? Has it ever occurred to
you that if something is new, it cannot be improved? One can only improve something
that is already old enough to have been a flop, and chances are the improvement
will only make it worse. The phrase new and improved — which usually means
“bigger box, less product” — was, as far as I can tell, coined by a fellow
named Irving B. Harris around 1943. He had developed a home permanent that
burned peoples’ hair, so when he figured out how to stop burning peoples’ hair
with his product, he called it “new and improved”. He saved the business! After all, who would want something that was
old and unimproved, unless of course it was a good bottle of wine or the
undying faithfulness of God to Israel.

Since the
home perm was invented, it appears we Americans have been wild about everything
new and we American Catholics we have been utterly gaga over progress for a
little over forty years: new nun’s habits, new liturgy, new liturgical styles,
new music, new morality, (which coincidentally seems to be the same thing the
old immorality, new everything. Heaven save us from the same old boring thing. The
new and improved religion seems to have the same result as the new improved
breakfast cereals — bigger box, less product. New patches and a perfectly good
old garment, new wine in very useful old wineskin. Kaboom! And a mess all over.
Bigger programs, bigger religious bureaucracies, fewer priests, nuns, weddings,
baptisms, funerals, and few believers. Time to reevaluate, I would think.

For 40 years
we have tried to make the sacraments new and meaningful. I don’t think it has
worked. Perhaps we can go back to a more practical and meaningful understanding
of the sacraments, taking some old things out of the storehouse. For instance
baptism. Now it’s a celebration of life. Maybe we could talk about the human
condition and the need to wash away original sin. First Communion. Maybe we
could do away with the photo-op- rite of passage-welcome to the banquet of the
community of faith. Perhaps we could return to the idea of offering our lives
to the Lord at the Sacrifice of the Mass and receiving His Body, Blood, Soul
and Divinity in return.

And
weddings. (Always with the weddings. This guy is obsessed.) At the time of
Christ, the cost of burial was bankrupting Israelite families. The burial
garment and the cost of the coffin and tomb just kept getting higher. The poor
were embarrassed by the shabbiness of their funerals and would have their faces
covered because their poor diets caused their faces to discolor quickly.
Eventually the great Rabban Gamaliel ordered that he be buried in a simple
shroud, face covered, and thus it became the fashion to do things simply.
Extravagant mourning is still forbidden to the Jews, and I have heard it said
that a toast is still drunk to Gamaliel in thanksgiving. We Christians should
drink a toast to Gamaliel too, for protecting Peter and John. There is a
tradition that Gamaliel may actually have accepted Christ. He is regarded as a
saint in the Eastern Church. Christian
or Jewish, Gamaliel is a person to whom the world owes much.

We need a
new Gamaliel, someone who will make simplicity fashionable again. How wonderful
it would be if the longing of those to be married, or communed, or confirmed
was the sacrament, and not the photo-op. How wonderful it would be if the
family of the deceased thought only of the repose of the soul of their beloved
dead and not just of their grief and the humorous eulogy. Where is a Gamaliel
now?

I am not
fashionable by any stretch of the term, but allow me to make a suggestion
regarding weddings. One of the reasons that people are not getting married in
church these days is the outrageous expense and bother of the whole thing. What
struggling couple can afford the $40,000 needed for the wedding? There are the
headaches of planning, the expense, the decision whom to pick for the bridesmaids,
whose irritating little offspring will be the flower girl, the little couple,
the ring bearer and if we pick nephew A, cousin B will be horribly insulted and
the bride would be embarrassed to tears if her wedding wasn’t at least at as
big as Becky Sue’s, that hussy! Wouldn’t
it be nice if somehow we could remember that a wedding was first and last a
sacrament established by Christ to give grace for a family life together?

Friday, November 15, 2013

Baptisms and
Funerals! Here I am really torn. On the one hand, if you say “No” to someone
who wants to have a child baptized, they will probably be angry enough to never
darken the door of your church again. If you say “Yes” to someone who rarely
comes to church and is in no sense a member of the parish, or even a practicing
Catholic, they will probably never darken the door of your church again either.
That is until it’s time for the kid’s first communion. You will see them again
for weddings, confirmations and other photo events.

If you say
“No”, it’s goodbye. So most priests want to be pastoral and say “Okay, but
you’ve got to start coming to church.” “Okay, Father we will.” And they do come:
three times — 7, 13 and about 25 years after the baptism. Here is a typical
phone call:

(Bridezilla)
“Hello, Are you the priest?”

(Pastor)
“Yes I am.”

(B) “I want
to rent your church for my wedding.”

(P) “Are you
a parishioner? “

(B) “......
(long pause)...yes I am.”

(P) “What’s your
name?”

(B) “I’m
Diadora Shickelgruber. Certainly you remember me, Father.”

(P) “I can’t
say that I do.”

(B) “Well I
probably go to the service you don’t celebrate.”

(P)”I say
most of the Masses and am always in the vestibule after Mass. Why do you want
to be married here at St. Dymphna’s?

(B) “I went
to school there and got all my sacraments there. When I was little I always
dreamed of walking down that aisle on my wedding day.”

(P) “Are you
currently attending another church?”

(B) “Oh yes,
Father. When we’re not at your church we go to a church closer to our house.”

(P) What is
the name of the church?”

(B) “I can’t
remember it right now.”

(P) “Because
you live twenty miles away, don’t attend regularly, and are not registered
here, I am going to need a letter of permission from the pastor of the church
you normally attend.”

(B) “....long
silence....How do I get that?”

(P)
Introduce yourself to your pastor after Mass and he will tell you how to make
an appointment.”

(B) “Oh.”
Click. Phone goes dead.

They are
either going to have a wedding in the park with the local shaman, or they are
going to pester the nearest Catholic priest who has also never met them for a
letter of permission until weakened by hunger and fatigue he gives it to them.
If not they will write a long letter to the bishop pointing out that their
grandfather gave a lot of money to the parish and the priest treated them
terribly. Some diocesan functionary will call and Father will give in.

The bride
invariably shows up dressed like a frigate in full sail at which point I am
tempted to wax eloquent on the beauties of virginity symbolized by the reams of
white lace and taffeta in which she is festooned, but that would just evoke another
letter to the bishop about how un-pastoral I am and so I preach a few
platitudes that will sound inoffensive on the video. And so the cycle starts
all over again.

We will see
them again a few years later when they want a baptism or something like it; or
someone they love, or at least fell guilty about, needs burial. We, the clergy,
refer to this sort of religion as “hatch, match and dispatch.” However, this is becoming much less common.
Very few, except homosexuals, wedding co-coordinators and divorce lawyers think
that it’s important to get married anymore; and most Catholics think birth
control is just fine. This abandonment of the sacramental life eases up the
pressure for baptisms, weddings and, oddly enough, even for funerals.

Ever since,
at the urging of Margaret Sanger (Foundress of Planned Parenthood), Drs. Pincus
and Rock invented the birth control pill in the early 1950's, things have been
changing. Puerto Rico was selected as a trial site in 1955. I suppose Puerto
Rico was chosen because the US government was already trying to reduce the
number of Puerto Ricans in the world with a string of birth control clinics on
the island. Perhaps Ms. Sanger, former friend of and collaborator with Adolph
Hitler, figured there were more Puerto Ricans than anyone wanted or needed.
Perhaps she figured if it worked on Catholic Puerto Ricans, it would work on Catholic
Mexicans, of whom Ms. Sanger also thought there were way too many, even back
then.

Guess what?
Puerto Ricans went for it despite their Catholicism and now most Puerto Ricans
aren’t Catholic. They are an aging population that has lost much of its beautiful
art and culture. Ms. Sanger couldn’t give a fig for their wonderful food,
delightful music, beautiful painting and wood carving. They were the wrong
color and the wrong religion as far as she was concerned, so let’s test the
pill on them. Those who renounced their faith in order to have a more relaxed
reproductive morality and a higher standard of living soon also renounced their
culture, and eventually renounced their progeny.

Having
devastated the Puerto Rican family, Planned Parenthood went on to devastate the
families of the USA proper. Catholic faith had not stood in the way of modern
narcissism in Puerto Rico and it would not stand in the way of the reduction of
the European American population of the United States, even though the birth
control pill had been designed by Sanger to get rid of all those brown and
black people cluttering up our lily white shores.

How, you may
ask does this take the pressure off for funerals in Catholic churches? We just
had an example here at St. Dymphna’s in Frostbite Falls. An elderly woman died
who had been active here as long as her health held out. After that, the family
put her in a very nice home. The woman had only one daughter. The daughter
didn’t seem very interested in having a large family and so there were only two
resultant grandchildren. Like their mother, they had little use for grandma. I
don’t think she got a lot of visits.

When I heard
that she had died, I was curious that no one had requested a funeral. It turns
out that she had died a while ago and no one had told us. The daughter said that they thought it
foolish to go to the bother and expense of a funeral. They cremated grandma and
went their merry ways. They all had lives to live. So it is, that there are fewer and fewer
funerals because there are fewer and fewer left to grieve and even fewer to
pray for the dead.

Our small
families have relieved us of the economic and financial burden of former times. The one or two children we thought
optimal were given everything except faith. Why should the little narcissists
mourn the dead? We gave them everything but never mentioned that they in turn
should be generous. The death of a grandparent is cause for rejoicing. The few
descendants are freed from the guilt of never visiting Grandma and now they get
all her money. Having not wasted her money on a brood of demanding little rug
rats, Grandma had amassed a tidy sum, which her one or two heirs, or their
lawyers will divide. Why waste any of it on a funeral that no one wants? No one
but Grandma, that is.

Remember
that scene in Dickens’ Christmas Carol? Having used his finances very
prudently, old Scrooge is un-mourned by anyone. The ghost of Christmas future
shows him his own overgrown grave. That poor dear woman I mentioned above does
not even have an overgrown grave. I imagine her ashes were scattered, or maybe
they are somewhere in the basement to be thrown out with the rest of her stuff.

When there are still enough people who
remember religion in some form, they schedule a funeral in a church where the
deceased may have more or less gone. They want the choir, the eulogy, the
sermon, the wake, the grave side, the whole nine yards and a video of the
proceedings... The most crazy-making thing that I get asked at funerals is
about scheduling. I have actually had people request a funeral months in
advance. When I looked confused and asked isn’t that a long time to wait? They responded, “Oh no Father, she’s not dead
yet, but she will be by then. We have to get everybody on the same page as to
the best date of the funeral. We have to check our calendars and we won’t take
her off life support until we have a tentative date picked.” I thought I was
dealing with a family of vampires.

It is now
very common to put grandma on ice, or if it’s going to be a really long time
before the calendars open up, Grandma will be burned and there will be a
“Memorial Service” whatever that may be. The modern mourners haven’t a clue
what Mass is about especially if they are born in the USA. They want the whole
enchilada and they darn well better get it. After all, they are paying for it!
And these are people who know the value of a dollar! They certainly haven’t
wasted any of it on having large families.

Of fifty
Americans at many funerals, perhaps two of them will be under the age of 30. Do
you really think those two remnants of once Catholic large families will bother
to have funeral masses for the childless multitude around them? When I offer a
funeral Mass, my grief is very real. I don’t however grieve for the departed
whom I have probably never met; I grieve for a way of life, a culture and a
community of faith that has died.

The Church
is growing: Africa, China, the Philippines, South America, Korea and so many
emerging cultures are on fire with faith. There has never been a time when so
many Muslims converted to Christianity. The faith is made glorious by those
made martyrs by their Muslim neighbors.

The faith is
not dying, the culture is. We have chosen ourselves over the God who made us
and loves us. We are now 60 years, give or take, after the invention of the
little golden pill, (as the singing nun called it). We have been born into the
birth-controlled, baby boomer consumerist revolution and are reaping the reward
of our own narcissism: extinction.

Monday, November 11, 2013

I
have pontificated at great length about weddings as sacramental travesty and
blasphemous abuse. Today I want to talk about weddings as performance art. This
absurdity requires wedding planners ($2,000) photographers ($2,400) and
videographers ($1,500). I was recently at a First Communion that meant so much
to the people involved that they actually forgot to take pictures until the
event was almost over. Grandma took a few photos at the end with her camera.
The young man (of 7 years) beamed with happiness at receiving his First
Communion. There was no bevy of frenzied adults playing at paparazzi to
distract him by snapping pictures. It was a rare and wonderful experience.

I
am always competing at sacraments now with the photographers. I have actually
been asked to “do it over again” at First Communions and weddings because the
camera jammed, or the battery died, or they didn’t like the pose. Now
photographers have opened up a whole new market: funerals. The funeral I mentioned earlier for which
sake I ended up in the police station trying to keep the grieving family from
being jailed was thoroughly video graphed by a rather large person invited for
the purpose by the would be eulogist. I suspect that the clown who took the
pulpit against my expressed prohibition was about to issue a broadside
denouncing the family of the deceased. I further suspect that this masterpiece
of oratory would then have been put on the web for the enjoyment of others. It
was certainly intended to be used as evidence, should the need arise because,
as the frustrated orator was escorted from the podium, he screamed “This is
being filmed! This is being filmed!” It certainly was being filmed and when I
and a few others managed to see the film, we got quite a laugh out of it, despite
the sadness of the event.

Another
funeral not long ago, I had to watch my step because some woman whose
acquaintance I have never made, kept moving around up and down the aisles and
up onto the altar with an I-pad. I think she was taking a video of the
proceedings, so she kept getting in front of me. I guess I was in the way of
the best view of the action.

There
is a wonderful piece of wedding video on YouTube. I doubt that it was a
Catholic wedding. The presiding minister has the kind of collar more favored by
Lutheran or Episcopalian clergy, and it is a garden wedding, the poor fellow’s
first mistake. The celebrant is bantering with the bride and groom (second
mistake) when suddenly he turns to the videographer and, I assume, the
photographer. The following dialogue ensues:

“Please,
sirs. Leave.”

The
photographer asks “Where do you want me to be?”

The
celebrant says “Anywhere other than here. This is a solemn assembly, not a
photography session. Please move or I will stop. I will stop this ceremony if
you do not get out of the way. This is not about the photography. This is about
God.” (Third mistake, it was not about God. It was about the photo shoot).

The celebrant (priest/minister/wearer of the
backwards collar/whatever) looks like the most humorless and smug Ichabod Crane-esque
practitioner of the religious arts you could ever hope to meet. He comes off as
the jerk. The cameraman wasn’t bothering anyone.

When
I watched the clip on YouTube I didn’t even notice the cameraman. (This is all
snide sarcasm on my part). Of course one doesn’t notice the cameraman. The
cameraman is the dispenser of reality. We live through our lenses now.
Experience and truth is dispensed in video form on our thin screen TVs, on our
phone on our I-pads. Our brains have relocated to that part of the body
formerly reserved for sitting.

The
new locus of our brains grows ever wider as life becomes a spectator sport. The
fellow mentioned earlier whose eulogy summed up his life in two words, booze
and sports did not actually play golf or football or baseball or basketball. By
“being into sports” it was meant that he spent most of his free waking hours
watching them on television. The life portrayed on television is much more
interesting than my humdrum life. If I am lonely I can watch happy people on
television enjoying friendships and laughter. There is always a rerun of Seinfeld or Friends or the Big Bang
Theory to help me forget that my life is a bit dreary. And there is drama!
All around me there is hunger, both spiritual and material. There is suffering
and anguish, illness and death in my own neighborhood, but it is not nearly as
thrilling as the drama on TV. TV somehow seems more real than the unexceptional
suffering of those whom I can actually help. There is nothing I can do about
the TV people expect to feel sorry for them, or feel interested in them.
Perhaps you remember my telling you that, as CS Lewis says, the devil wants us
to feel charitable. God wants us to be charitable. The devil has found quite an
ally in the camera. When we turn a sacrament into photo event it becomes less
real not more real. It is certainly not wrong to take pictures at a wedding.
But to make the pictures the purpose for the wedding is wrong.

I
should be more careful about bad mouthing weddings these days. No one is
getting married anymore, except of course for homosexuals. We have only a few weddings every year. All
the priests I talk to report the same phenomenon. When I was a boy being
intimate (a euphemism for the more sensitive reader) outside of marriage was a
cause for real shame. Now it’s a cause for housewarming gifts and
congratulations. There is the old adage about the foolishness of purchasing a
cow, when in fact dairy products have become widely available without any cost
or commitment.

I
suggest another video. (See, even I can’t get away from it.) It’s called Cohabiters
Vows and is easy to find on the web. In it a minister/officiant stands before a
couple seated in bed, half covered, she in a ratty robe, and he in an old white
t-shirt (no nudity or indecency.) The minister stands alone. There are no
witnesses or well wishers. The minister
begins by saying, “Blank look into Blank’s eyes and with all the truth you can
muster up, repeat after me: I, Blank, take you Blank to be my cohabiter, to
have sex with you and hold you responsible for half the bills, to love and to
take advantage of you from this day forward or as long as our arrangement works
out. I will be more or less faithful to you as long as my needs are met and
nothing better comes along. If we should break up, it does not mean that this
wasn’t special because I love you almost as much as I love myself. I commit to
live with you as long as it works out, so help me...Me. In the name of Sex,
Selfishness and Options. Amen.” Then the minister says “Well, Blank and Blank,
let me be the first to congratulate you both. You are now officially living
together. I sincerely wish you the very best and I hope that this does work
out. You may now... well, you know what
to do.” And off walks the minister.

Why
bother with all the legal encumbrances and expense if not for the photo event
that will make all the bride’s friends drool with envy and the grooms friends
look forward to a series of drunken parties at which they can exchange all the
pledges of “bro-mance” such as the best man’s toast: “I like mean like I really
love you man. I really mean it. Like not in a weird way or anything, but
really, dude.” (Bro-mance: a new word describing a non “intimate” yet very
romantic relationship between two men who never ever consider anything more,
well... intimate. This relationship, not expressed intimately is expressed by
the two traditional pillars of male friendship: sports and booze.)

There
is simply no reason to go to all that rigmarole and not take $5,000 worth of
pictures. What’s the point? Mommy and Daddy used to threaten to cut you out of
the will. Now they try to be supportive, praying secretly that it breaks up
before anyone gets pregnant. Not to worry. No one gets pregnant much anymore
either, at least not until they have an established career that will at least
pay for the day care. So what’s the point, if not pictures and a party (with
more pictures)?

The
sacrament is the point, the stability and safety ‘til death do us part covenant
relationship that creates the environment in which a man and woman can work out
their own salvation and bring children into the world in an environment that is
safe and nurturing.

Rev. Know-it-all

About Me

Rev. Know-it-all is the alter ego of Fr. Richard Simon, Pastor of St. Lambert Parish, Skokie, IL.
Now a regular host of Relevant Radio's "Fr. Simon Says", Fr. Simon spent over 20 years "...teaching dead languages to comatose seminarians."
Credits: The Reverend Know-It-All is a parody of Mr. Know-It-All, the alter ego of Bullwinkle J. Moose, a carton character created by Jay Ward (1920-1989).